"Pick Your Poison" by Samantha Fortenberry
[And That's All I Have to Say About That]
1. This is a way of explaining things so that you can understand.
2. In this poem, take the legs as a proxy for the penis.
, I know I can’t do anything to help you.
Four hundred, thirty-one miles. I was trying anyway, trying out on Lieutenant Dan’s knotted sea knobs on the road into Egypt--
sweat stink. Beard all
Moses-like. Jenny, we were red and white.
We were my special shoes,
supporting some pre- stage polio, a sheer gown, or sheet, over the jungle floor faces
of the god damned burnt up bodies, bullfrogs already biting us
up in the ass and soaking the chocolates we haven’t yet eaten in a blue Volkswagen ejaculation.
That made us run.
Now, “Is there a Mr. Gump, Mrs. Gump?” Repeat these sounds back to me; overnight, in the night. Come
and repeat, stop only to sleep, the same young boy, just because we feel like it, mimicking the sounds of his mother’s bedroom, the
screams of her blood, the crimson tide; the cliché phrase,
I won’t say it.
## 44, penetrating the D-Line, carrying the rock toward the end zone, the white the crimson running like the wind blows in a wild
montage set to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind”. ROLLLLLLLL TIDE. GO. RED AND WHITE.
the time: three years; two months; fourteen days; sixteen hours. We’ve been running;
a storm of many squeaks, jags, prongs even, to the leg, throwing shoes rocks a bulldozer toward the house until
collapsing the body until collapsing into your nipples and into my nipples.
The same young boy bounded by the breaking (in) of his shoes, coming over his (obstructions),
those shoes you gave me, you were those shoes. Red and white. Fast and stupid.
Some identity, between a bird and a forest in a pair of Nikes
and for no particular reason at all caught like a wildfire out of control
young and strong, you were running against the wind.
COREY ZIELINSKI is currently pursuing a PhD in Poetics at SUNY Buffalo. When he is not reading obscure literature or writing term papers, he enjoys going for the occasional run or eating chicken fried rice (and sometimes does both at the same time).
SAMANTHA FORTENBERRY is a photographer from a small town in Northern Alabama. She currently studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Ever since high school she's taken a passion to photography and photographs various subjects from surreal landscapes to fine art nudes and everything in between. Website: samanthafortenberry.com
